The holy and the spirit of our age

The holy and the spirit of our age

Posted on January 26th, 2010 by Frank Wilson

I have been paging through Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings, which happens to be the first book I reviewed professionally. I don’t know how many people remember Hammarskjöld. He was the second Secretary-General of the United Nations and by far its most effective. Indeed, I would argue that, for all practical purposes, the UN died the day Hammarskjöld was killed in an air crash in what is now Zaire.

Markings was published posthumously. It is a kind of journal. Hammarskjöld himself described it — I am relying on memory — as a white paper concerning his negotiations with himself and God. If Socrates was right, and the unexamined life is not worth living, Hammarskjöld’s life would have to be counted among the more worthwhile, since he made sure to examine it carefully, with nary a hint of self-congratulation.

The entry that caught my attention before I began this column is characteristic:

Only in man has the evolution of the creation reached the point where reality encounters itself in judgment and choice. Outside of man, the creation is neither good nor evil.

Only when you descend into yourself and encounter the Other, do you then experience goodness as the ultimate reality — united and living — in Him and through you.

The phrase “evolution of the creation” may seem striking, what with all the yammering these days pitting the notion of the one against the notion of the other. But evolution hasn’t always been thought of as purposeless. The philosophically literate will recall that Henri Bergson’s masterwork was called Creative Evolution. The English translation of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenology of Man — which posited that a God-guided evolution was tending toward what Teilhard called the Omega Point — appeared only a couple of years before Hammarskjöld’s death. Among those influenced by Teilhard was Marshall McLuhan.

You will notice in the passage above that Hammarskjöld identifies the “ultimate reality” as goodness and that he understands this to be “living.” Hammarskjöld, I gather, was at least nominally a Lutheran, but in Markings he quotes the Sufi poet Rumi: “The lovers of God have no religion but God alone.” Hammarskjöld was certainly seriously religious, but in a way that was devoid of sanctimony.

In fact, I don’t think anyone was aware of Hammarskjöld’s religious preoccupations until after his death — although, not long after he became Secretary-General, he did say in a radio interview with Edward R. Murrow that “the explanation of how man should live a life of active social service in full harmony with himself as a member of the community of spirit, I found in the writings of those great medieval mystics for whom ‘self-surrender’ had been the way to self-realization, and who in ‘singleness of mind’ and ‘inwardness’ had found strength to say yes to every demand which the needs of their neighbors made them face, and to say yes also to every fate life had in store for them when they followed the call of duty as they understood it.”

I suppose there are plenty of politicians and bureaucrats who are conventionally religious (and in saying this I mean no disrespect), but I somehow suspect there are few indeed who see politics and administration as a mystical way.

It was Hammarskjöld’s view that “in our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.” And there, of course, is the rub. Holiness is not something that preoccupies us much these days. And it certainly doesn’t seem a preoccupation of those engaged in statecraft or diplomacy. People may go on retreats, become “born again,” seek true enlightenment, but you don’t hear many people talk about trying to be holy.

The word, of course, has to do with wholeness, but it is wholeness defined in terms of a relation with God, a relation characterized by recognition of complete dependence upon and submission to the divine will. Or, as Hammarskjöld put it: